Worse than Dead: A Critical Response to McKenzie Wark

James W reviews McKenzie Wark’s Capital is Dead.

Nearly a year has passed since the publication of McKenzie Wark’s short book Capital is Dead: Is This Something Worse? More than half of that time has been spent in the midst of an unprecedented global crisis which has impacted the course of history in ways that cannot yet be fully understood. Simultaneous mass uprisings against racism and police brutality have brought the brutality of the state into stark relief against the transparent unwillingness of the ruling class to deploy its financial resources to mitigate the effect of the pandemic on the public. The novelty of our present historical circumstances are worthy of radical investigation, and the hypothesis of Wark’s book certainly aspires to such radicalism. Caught between algorithmic policing and contact tracing, the time is ripe for rethinking what “information” really means to communists. Unfortunately, the rhetorical content of the book is a stubborn refusal to actually say anything radical. Capital is Dead spends its most of its pages trying to justify its own existence by attacking any dialectical method which might seek to venture onto Wark’s terra sancta, the realms of science and technology in the purely empirical sense which she chooses to conceive them. Seen in retrospect, Wark’s thesis (that we have actually been living through a new and brutal mode of post-capitalist production for quite some time) appears to have been dead on arrival. However, if we proceed from an immanent critique of Wark’s postivistic treatment of information theory, we can recover the critical Marxist insight that a radical understanding of the present can make the past itself seem brand new.

It is disappointing then that in the months immediately following the book’s release, responses to Capital is Dead mostly took the book at its word and agreed to the terms set out by Wark’s “thought experiment.” Engagement with the book purely on its own terms, however, inevitably produced little more than golf-clapping affirmation from a critical theory industry more interested in asking questions than seeking out answers. If the book were as radical as the title would have us believe, one would have expected more responses like the scathing anonymous polemic published in Homintern, which excoriates the book as a self-serving exercise in critical theorizing in which Wark makes “Marx a poet, technology a feeling, class a job, and herself a joke.” The review is funny, concise, and devastatingly accurate, but it still grants (albeit minimally) that Wark’s attempt to “turn techno-positivism into a critical instrument is, taken alone, the start of something promising.” On the contrary, it is precisely Wark’s positivist epistemology which pulls the rug out from under anything radical she might have had to say. Only once we approach contact tracing and social media surveillance from a Marxist direction can we situate them in a radical theory of information, liberated from the confines imposed, ironically, by the false radicalism of Capital is Dead.

Accordingly, we must see Capital is Dead as a proposed solution to a proposed problem. As of the late 20th century, the global system of production and exchange has relied on information science and data harvesting in ways that seem to bear very little immediate resemblance to the capitalism which Marx originally described. Wark argues that this state of affairs demands a response, and to the limited extent she believes such responses exist, she finds them woefully insufficient because of two assumptions that supposedly result from a religious and ahistorical fidelity to Marx’s original analysis. The first is what we will loosely call the diachronic assumption that capitalism must necessarily last until communism. The second assumption is the dialectical assumption that there is a gap between the “essence” and the “appearance” of a given mode of production—that the way capitalism looks could be different from the way capitalism is. Combined, the result is an inability to think of capital as historically contingent: although the present mode of production appears to be something other than capitalism, it must still be capitalism, because it is not communism. Wark sums up the problem-solution structure of Capital is Dead herself: “how then can a concept of capitalism be returned to its histories? By abandoning the duality of its essence and appearance.”¹

Capital is Dead identifies these two related assumptions as the main theoretical shortcomings for the critical theorists who’ve gotten “stuck trying to explain all emerging phenomena as if they were always expressions of the same eternal essence of Capital.”² These “academic” Marxists have been reduced to merely chronicling capitalism’s development through a diverse set of appearances, such as “disaster, cognitive, semio, neuro, late, biopolitical, neoliberal, or postfordist capitalism, to name just a few options.”³ Wark might be amused to know that, as of July 2020, “Pandemic Capitalism” is in fact already the title of several articles and at least one forthcoming book. In light of the radical changes to our lives recently, it is easy to understand where Wark is coming from when she asks the reader if “the capitalism that we have all agreed that we live in, has […] become too familiar, too cozy, too roomy an idea?”⁴ Wark’s corrective, however, has far-ranging theoretical implications which demand careful consideration.

Anti-Anti-Duhring

The dialectical assumption which Wark first proposes to jettison is in fact very deeply rooted in what she calls the “received ideas and legacy language”⁵ of orthodox readings of Marx. Wark’s critique of this assumption relies heavily on the heterodox Marxism of Louis Althusser, who uses the terms “expressive causality” or “expressive totality” to criticize those theories of history which proceed from an opposition between “phenomenon and essence.”⁶ In a general sense, theories of expressive causality take each superstructural phenomena to be only expressions of the same essential economic base or mode of production. As a consequence, each superstructural element, being each at once identical to that social totality yet superficially non-identical to each other element, must logically be a false appearance. Althusser radically broke with this theory of causality, and Wark follows him by reading theories of expressive causality as theories of eternal capitalism: “The essence of Capital is eternal. It goes on forever, and everything is an expression of its essence. Capital is the essence expressed everywhere, and its expression is tending to become ever more total.”⁷

Wark does not simply take Althusser as the only point of departure for her analysis, however. For her, Althusser’s thought is in a certain sense still too dogmatic and genteel: he does not go far enough in his anti-dialectical approach to Marxism. Even though “political and cultural superstructures were not mere appearances,” to Althusser, he still saw them as relegated to “the reproduction of the essential economic form of capitalism.”⁸ His inability to take the final steps towards empiricism is for Wark symptomatic of his insistence on Marxism as a “philosophical method” for which philosophy is the “sovereign form of knowledge.”⁹ If it cannot be contradicted by the vulgar empiricism of day-to-day experience, Althusserian Marxism is just as dogmatic as the “Hegelian” Marxism it criticizes, insistent on the diachronic assumption instead of the dialectical one. For Wark’s Althusserians, there isn’t an ontological gap between the appearance and the essence of capitalism, but there is a sort of epistemic one, bridgeable only by a privileged form of abstract knowledge.

Therefore, Wark suggests that theories of adjective-capitalisms are actually also based on the structuralism of Louis Althusser to the extent that his analysis decenters the relations and forces of production. Althusser conceives of the social totality as a structure in which each element (economy, culture, government, etc) has a relatively horizontal relation to the others, with the economic dimension only taking precedence in the last instance. In Wark’s account, Althusser’s Marxism “was like catnip to academic Marxists looking for ways to fit into conventional academic disciplines, because it allowed for three distinct objects of study: the economic, the political, and the ideological (or cultural.)”¹⁰ Each element gains just enough autonomy from the economic “base” to allow endless “Marxist” analyses of cultural life without anyone having to question the historical assumption that we still persist in a capitalist mode of production.

The net result is a prevailing belief among university professors and theorists that an essential capitalism must persist despite apparently bearing little resemblance to the steam-hammer and spinning-jenny of Marx’s time. As a corrective, Wark proposes a new approach that proceeds by “describing relations of exploitation and domination in the present, starting with the emerging features, and work back and out and up from that.”¹¹ Such a project, the construction of a new theory of history, however, is preempted by Wark’s theoretical commitment to empiricism: where Althusser seems to have erred by privileging philosophy as a sovereign form of knowledge, Wark attempts a corrective by privileging all forms and fields of specialist scientific knowledge.

Zombie Positivism

Capital is Dead is founded on this shaky theoretical premise: there must always be some element of science and technology which can “only be known through the collaborative production of a critical theory sharing the experiences of many fields,”¹² and is therefore impossible to fully theorize and incorporate into the “essence” (base) or “appearance” (superstructure) of this or that mode of production. Such an empirically available residue is definitionally excluded from expressive totalities. However, it must also lie beyond the Althusserian social totality as well to the extent it is not available to purely philosophical inquiry and remains the subject of only the more particular fields of knowledge.

In setting out to defend Capital’s continued “function as a historical concept,”¹³ Wark first intentionally forfeits the most readily available theoretical means for thinking the technological or scientific in the context of any totality (either structural or dialectical.) Totalizing theories, Wark argues, cannot ever fully accommodate the results of the empirical sciences: “where the relations of production can be understood theoretically, the forces of production cannot. They don’t lend themselves to an abstract, conceptual overview by a master thinker within a genteel high theory.”¹⁴ The totality is, by its definition, not empirically available to the individual observer, encompassing more than they could ever hope to measure, and as such appears to be beyond the horizon of Wark’s Marxism.

When Wark heavily qualifies her book as only a “minimally plausible”¹⁵ thought experiment aimed at re-historicizing capitalism against belief in the “eternal essence of Capital,” her idea of history must be necessarily limited insofar as it excludes the privileged results of scientific inquiry regarding technology, nature, or the inorganic world writ large. At the very same time, her idea of history must also exclude elements of the classical dialectical formulation to the extent that such constructions rely theoretically on expressive causalities (and therefore rejecting any dialectical relationship between base and superstructure and, consequently, most non-Althusserian theories of totality).

We end up with a bit of a bait-and-switch. What started as a thought experiment becomes instead an everything-must-go reimagining of Marxism as a method for organizing scientific inquiry, which requires starting over entirely from only the most basic empirical precepts. Wark states that Capital is Dead attempts to “think a materialist history in a really quite “orthodox” way,”¹⁶ but that is not what happens. We end up with a superficially Althusserian concept of non-dialectical history for which the stages of production are more of a heuristic for organizing the various relations and forces of productions as we observe them in daily life, but lack a sovereign form of knowledge that can order them or relate them all to each other.

But are these concessions even necessary for her thought experiment? One can certainly entertain the possibility of non-capitalist, non-communist futures without discarding the dialectical content of Marxist thinking. The “common ruin of the contending classes”¹⁷ is a theoretically permissible outcome of the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. She even gestures in this direction herself in Chapter 4, suggesting that neither capitalism or socialism survived the Cold War, and from their mutual ruin emerged a new mode of production. With that in mind, the attack on dialectical materialism seems more so aimed at pre-empting any other readings of the significance of information to production. In reality, Marxists actually are free to develop a new total history into which a new mode of production could be incorporated (were such a thing justified). That said, such a history would have to be fully theorized in ways which Wark would resist.

***Vectoralism*, or Something Worse?**

Having clarified Wark’s theoretical commitments, we are now safe to temporarily grant Wark’s premise. She has in fact cleared the way to introduce new terminology and class relations to see how they fit the data, even if she insisted on first sandblasting every other possible option. In her proposed schematic, the emerging locus of class domination is control of the vector, a threefold object¹⁸ encompassing (1) data itself, (2) the computational and telecommunications infrastructure used to interpret and transmit that data and (3) the actual path or direction that (1) follows through (2). For Wark, the vector is related to but entirely distinct from capital as Marx understood it: the vector is “the material means for assembling so-called big data and realizing its predictive potential.”¹⁹ Ownership of the vector, then, becomes the means of realizing surplus value for the new ruling class.

Wark posits the existence of this new “vectoralist class,” a sort of neo-bourgeoisie which owns the vectors, alongside the new “hacker class”, a class that primarily produces the novel data for which the vector is the sole means of realizing value. Distinct from the proletariat, who were tasked with “having to make the same thing, over and over,”²⁰ the hacker class must produce the “new” information for the vector. By Wark’s new definition, hacking is often unpaid work: the vectoralist class is able to squeeze value from the information collected passively from hackers via FitBit and Alexa in much the same way as they squeeze it from the brands, patents, and programs which hackers are tasked with producing during their paid workdays.

For its part, Capital is Dead does convincingly argue that the realization of value in the imperial core increasingly relies on control of supply chains, logistical data and intellectual property. Such a thing scarcely needed to actually be argued, though. The problem for Wark’s conclusion is that despite her attempt to “conceptualize the problem synchronically,”²¹ her theory for the production and control of information, novelty, and networks can only function in the context of this single proposed mode of post-capitalist production.

If the relations of production can only be theorized on the basis of empirically available forces of production, which cannot themselves be theorized, we have a very serious theoretical problem for trying to think about capitalism, feudalism, or really anything other than vectoralism. We can conceive of a theory of capitalism which is derived purely from empirical results, and we can also think of a theory of feudalism which is derived purely from empirical results, but to relate these theories in anything resembling a totality would also necessarily entail theoretically relating the empirical results of “semi-autonomous” fields of study to one another, which Capital is Dead forbids. In The Political Unconscious, Fredric Jameson proposes a corrective to Althusser’s social totality, emphasizing that “the notion of ‘semi-autonomy’ necessarily has to relate as much as it separates. Otherwise, the levels will simply become autonomous tout court, and break into the reified space of the bourgeois disciplines.”²²

That’s exactly what happens to Wark’s analysis when she cuts Althusser’s “sovereign knowledge” lifeline, and then she presents it as a good thing. The full autonomy of the sciences rapidly metastasizes to the full autonomy of the historical stages of production, and consequently previous or future historical stages are no longer available to Wark’s methods except insofar as they remain available for empirical study in the present. Synchronic modes of production only can exist as either unlabeled bones of extinct species or as crashed spaceships from the distant future, but Wark does not have a way to tell which is which without breaking her own rules, which she does often. When she concedes that “many of the world’s peoples are not even workers but still peasants who are being turned into tenant farmers by the theft of their common land by a landlord class […] much of the world is also a giant sweatshop,” she engages in a Marxist analysis that is built with the theoretical tools that she supposedly rejects. For that reason, her analysis of “older class antagonisms” can only be to simply add “a new layer on top.”²³

Such shortcomings are inevitable because a meaningfully synchronic view must see classes and modes of production as more than categories for empirical data points. We can only see them as emerging or disappearing if they’re indexed by historical time. Historical time requires a totality; not even necessarily a dialectical totality, but a totality all the same. Althusser says as much in his treatment of the topic, arguing for the construction of a “Marxist concept of historical time on the bases of a Marxist conception of the social totality.”²⁴ It is not possible for Wark to situate the vectoral mode of production within an Althusserian social totality, being derived from empirical principles to which a sovereign form of philosophical knowledge would not have actual access. However, it is also not possible for her to situate her the vectoral mode of production within a traditionally dialectical totality because such a theoretical construction would, to a greater or lesser extent, require an expressive causality which is also forbidden by the premise of Wark’s thought experiment.

Rather than pushing us to “think synchronically about a matrix of antagonistic classes that includes emerging ones,”²⁵ as she intended, we are instead forced into a theoretical position which is itself antichronic. In order to say anything about history, Wark asks that we first assume it to be arranged in a certain way, which is exactly the diachronic mistake we were trying to correct. Capitalism becomes what is trapped in our museums²⁶ and vectoralism is what we live in now. Feudalism can only be something that came before capitalism on the road to vectoralism. If our academic Marxists can only conceive of capitalism as the pre-history of a future communism, then Wark is only able to theorize past modes of production to the extent that they might be mere pre-histories to her hypothetical vectoralism. As for communism, well, “Communism is dead.”²⁷

Data and the Darstellung

Capital is Dead presents itself as being all about getting down and dirty on the cutting edge of technology. It is an appeal to Marxist readers to re-center the forces of production and get started working with them hands-on. However, we have to do it in the way that Wark wants and come to the conclusions that she’s already decided on. Otherwise, we risk becoming like those scary Soviet dogmatists who tried to figure out how “Marxism could be interpreted as having been compatible with modern physics even before it existed.”²⁸ Wark doesn’t want us to think about Marxist theories of technology and nature which would attempt to extend the totality to the non-human, the geological, the more purely scientific. Such a move would require entertaining the possibility of Marxism as an explanatory worldview which, if perhaps not capable of making direct ontological claims, would at least be able to make descriptive claims about the ways the sciences actually work in class society without fear of treading on their toes. When Mckenzie Wark admits that “climate science has to be addressed as being, for better or worse, a science of the totality”²⁹ one is forced to wonder why the same concession is not extended to Marxism.

In his corrective to Althusser, Fredric Jameson offers a version of History-as-totality, providing a Marxist framework which can both respect and incorporate the results of the sciences. To differentiate fields of inquiry at all, to see physics, computer science, climatology, biology or information science as distinct domains, would require the assumption of a prior totality within which and from which they could be seen as autonomous. Jameson proposes that the value of Althusser’s criticism is only recovered if one sees “difference as a relational concept, rather than as the mere inert inventory of unrelated diversity.”³⁰ Both structural and expressive totality are reliant on a form of mediation that relates either its semi-autonomous parts or its false appearances (respectively) by either difference or identity (respectively.) Mediation establishes “initial identity, against which then (but only then) local identification or differentiation can be registered.”³¹

So let us instead chart such a path: neither adjective-capitalism nor vectoralist production, but a vision of History as the horizon onto which no metaphysical categories can be forced, not even “man” or “machine” or “nature.” It is this horizon to which Marxist theories of totality always aspire but always fall short: in his commentary on The Political Unconscious, William C. Dowling explains that “to think the totality is thus to see in a sudden flash of insight that an adequate notion of society includes even the notion of an external universe, that society must always function as the whole that includes all things, the perimeter beyond which nothing else can exist.”³² We should, for better or worse, try to think the totality all over again.

To see development of the productive process in a truly synchronic sense would then be to trace its contours against the entire backdrop of History, which remains the “absent cause” for the diachronic differentiation of the various social forms. When Wark describes information as “a relation between novelty and repetition, noise and order” which can be extracted and valorized “even from free labor,”³³ she is pointing to a model of enclosure and control that cannot and should not be confined to the present but must instead be radically projected backwards and forwards. We may even need to see information not as a new form of commodity but instead, perhaps at first only speculatively, begin to see the commodity form as an older and less general expression of the principles of the information sciences as we now understand them.

In that direction, we should follow Wark when she hints at the strange “ontological properties”³⁴ of information. If it is too random, it is indecipherable static. If it is entirely predictable, it is redundant and conveys nothing new to the recipient.³⁵ When Wark limits Marxism to a mere empirical method for analyzing the specifics of this or that mode of production, she misses that information could itself be productively conceived as a unity of opposites, containing the very “sameness” and “difference” that supposedly divides the hacker from the proletarian. If one unbinds the contradictory nature of information through the whole of history, one can begin to see the individuation of the rationalized proletarian or the enclosure of previously undifferentiated Commons into numbered plots of land as a production of the difference necessary for the production of sameness in the universally exchangeable commodity form. Primitive accumulation and capital accumulation become legible in terms of information. What’s more, one can identify such processes of division and individuation as accelerating at all scales, from the individual to the international, in tandem with the overproduction of commodities and the decline of the rate of profit.

Encounters With Necessity

French philosopher Cecile Malaspina presents a dialectical account of information that fearlessly bridges the gaps between statistical physics, information theory, critical theory and thermodynamics in ways that point towards the big-picture approach Marxists should take to the sciences. In unfolding information, Malaspina finds the components that not only make it work but also which bring it into conversation with the theories of History we have been concerned with. For instance, to be intelligible, a unit of information relies on an “a priori restriction on the ‘freedom of choice’ in the message”³⁶ in the form of redundancy. It necessarily must contain information which the recipient already has about language and structure and is therefore not free to choose. “Redundancy is the part of a message that imposes a constraint,”³⁷ writes Malaspina, and “without redundancy, the pure novelty of information would be absolutely incomprehensible and equivalent with noise.”³⁸ The structure is redundant because it is certain; the message is novel because it is uncertain. For Malaspina, information is the “progressive unfolding of this relation between certainty and uncertainty.”³⁹

These dialectical notions of “constraint” and “uncertainty” slide naturally into Jameson’s notion of History as the totality. He concludes the first chapter of The Political Unconscious by definining such a History to be “the experience of Necessity,” where Necessity is the “the operation of objective limits.”⁴⁰ One cannot help but hear something of a pessimistic rhyme with Malaspina: Necessity is the part of History that imposes a constraint, that part of History which exerts non-local causality on subjects when it “refuses desire and sets inexorable limits to individual as well as collective praxis.”⁴¹ Necessity is the container and History is its shape, nowhere immanently present yet everywhere making itself known through its effects.

In this sense, the “history of class struggles” is also a History of information warfare, where the ever-present but uncertain potentiality of Communism must always be precluded by Necessity— what Malaspina identifies as that which “cannot not be, or cannot be otherwise.”⁴² It marks the degree to which the future is predicted in advance, the degree to which it is certain. Freedom of choice is eliminated in the structure of redundancies which are constantly made more complex to ensnare each new avenue of collective possibility. Though this fractionalisation and individuation occurs at every level of society, the city in particular is the site of a dramatic expansion of surveillance under the guise of “contact tracing.” Writing for Failed Architecture, Kevin Rogan identifies the “impenetrable system of rational control” that so-called “smart cities” would impose on collective spaces in the name of stopping the spread of the coronavirus as not itself new in principle—“The first factories were spaces under surveillance, as were colonial holdings, and the tactic was absolutely essential in maintaining slavery at every stage, from ship’s hold to plantation.” What is actually new is the degree to which “every facet of life has been made quantifiable in order to make this all possible.” The (re-)rationalization of the individual becomes the predicate for the (re-)rationalization of the city, and both are subject to new re-divisions as necessary.

Perhaps that’s part of the reason for Wark’s fidelity to empiricism. She very clearly identifies liberatory potential in the hacker class’ capacity to produce novelty and difference. Extending the notion of information and its component parts of sameness and difference through a totalizing History would mean dealing with the uncomfortable truth that producing the “new” is not only not unique to hackers but also has often been the task of the ascendant ruling classes at the moment of their victory. Building the new Republic meant not only beheading Louis XVI but also heading off that possibility for a deeper collective liberation which has accompanied the poor, the unemployed, the landless and the marginalized since the fall from primitive communism. The Herbertists were beheaded, too.

For all its apparent pessimism that this might not be capitalism anymore but Something Worse, Wark’s arc of history still bends towards a future defined by the liberation of information from the constraints of the vector by the hacker class. When Wark declares “Communism is dead” it is because she herself actually misunderstands Communism as a telos. But Communism isn’t just in the future, it’s also our past. At every juncture of the historical process the impetus for collective liberation has been present, always existing as a potentiality—something that could happen—from slave revolts to Peasant Wars to Reconstruction. Wark is right to see the predictive power of big data as a threat: prediction means the pre-emption of the possibility that things could be otherwise, the death of a potentiality.

When we understand capital as “dead labor,” we can begin to see it in the terms of History and Necessity. Dead labor is labor that no longer has the capacity to be other than what it is—it is now crystallized in the form of capital by Necessity. Capital is, in its most basic terms, the time the oppressed classes could’ve spent doing something else but were instead forced to work for the benefit of the ruling classes. It is in this way that the increasingly perfect knowledge of the ruling class about our locations and trajectories is a sort of enclosure of the future itself, turning it into capital by analogy with dead labor—our time which can no longer be spent otherwise. It is in these terms that capital itself is also continuous with pre-capitalist systems of control. The processes of enclosure which created capital are themselves paradoxically legible in terms of capital via our expanded concept of information.

From our 21st century perspective we can see that capital isn’t dead, it’s actually much worse. It has built an informational time machine and has headed back to the first divisions of labor so that it could become what it was always going to be. Maybe in this sense, it really is eternal: caught in a loop of constant re-enclosure and re-division to chop up our potentialities and wall them off into so many individual subjects or labor markets until the environmental bottom falls out. But, to quote Jameson, again: “History is what hurts.”⁴³ As long as the ruling classes perpetually try to force us back into the meat grinder of primitive accumulation for another go-round, we can know for sure that we are still alive, History hasn’t stopped, and other futures are still open to us if we aren’t afraid to theorize them.

2020.08.092020.08.09

Unmasking Social Construction with Djamil Lakhdar

Donald and Rudy are joined by Djamil Lakhdar to discuss Ian Hacking’s book The Social Construction of What?. Written during the “science wars”, Hacking intervenes in the debate between strict constructivism and strict realism. Hacking reframes the types of questions to be asked when interrogating the social origin of something, and clarifies the different approaches we can take when we interrogate the construction of a concept. We start off with natural and social sciences, and continue to the application of these questions to today’s world. Is physics socially constructed? What does it mean to say gender, race or even capitalism are socially constructed? Where can we go from that assertion? What does it mean to say Marxism has Eurocentric origins and how does that matter today? Does Marxism have a single method, and how do different tendencies relate to that method? We try to answer these and more questions on this episode of Cosmopod.

As always, please subscribe to our Patreon for early access to podcasts and other rewards.

2020.08.05

The Materialism of Warm-Stream Marxism: Ernst Bloch on Ibn Sina

Daniel Tutt writes on German Marxist Ernst Bloch’s engagement with the Islamic scholar Ibn Sina and its potential for revitalizing materialist philosophy.

The Marxist philosopher Ernst Bloch was marginalized in his own time, branded a renegade idealist by the Stalinist regime, exiled in America from the Nazi war machine, and barred from the Frankfurt School for views that were “too communist.” But his thought has continued to gather interest in 21st century Marxist and philosophical circles due to both the reemergence of theological interest within Marxist thought, and a turn to speculative materialism in continental philosophy starting in the early 2000s. Although his works The Spirit of Utopia (1918) and The Principle of Hope (1954) are widely read today, a number of his most important works remain untranslated from German. This untranslated corpus includes his three-volume Das Materialismusproblem that examines both the history of materialism and Bloch’s innovative synthesis of Hegel, Schelling, and Marx.

Among Marxists Bloch is well-known for his writings on the idea of utopia. Bloch analyzes historically this concept in pre-capitalist religious egalitarian movements such as Thomas Müntzer’s medieval peasant’s rebellion, and in social formations that reflect partial and anticipatory consciousness of emancipation. How Bloch theorizes utopia and the principle of hope from a distinctive Marxist and historical materialist orientation is best understood by a distinction he offers in Principle of Hope, a book written in exile in America. There, he posits two dominant strains of Marxism: the cold-stream and warm-stream. The cold-stream is analytical and concerned with the unmasking of ideologies and the disenchantment of metaphysical illusion, that is, a ruthless critique of existing oppression. The warm-stream is the “liberating intention and materialistically humane, humanely materialistic real tendency, towards whose goal all these disenchantments are undertaken.”¹

Bloch theorizes the two strains not as separate poles working in isolation, but as a necessary synthesis. He insisted that the coldness and warmth of concrete anticipation taken together ensure that “neither the path in itself, nor the goal in itself, are held apart from one another undialectically.”² Bloch thus sought to embed historical materialism in these two streams while recognizing that the warm-stream was often ignored and marginalized in Marxist practice from Marx’s own time to the present. We should understand these two strains as both an epistemological and a praxis-based distinction. Unlike the analytic cold-stream, which is often exclusively concerned with economic analysis, the warm-stream is concerned with the ways in which the “debased, enslaved, abandoned and belittled human beings” make appeals of emancipation. The warm-stream points to what he calls a “homeland of identity, in which neither man behaves towards the world, nor the world behaves towards man, as if towards a stranger.”³ The warm-stream is thus the utopian revolutionary imagination which can only be fully achieved from the vantage point of a classless society.⁴

The warm-stream can also be read as a form of secular religious conversion involving a commitment to human emancipation. Such an idea of Marxism as a conversionary experience is articulated by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s in You Must Change Your Life (2009). Here Sloterdijk argues revolutionary socialist and communist movements proposed a model of conversion based on the necessity of man to develop a new awareness of the ‘vertical axis.’ Playing on the immanent-transcendent distinction, Sloterdijk names the vertical axis that axis by which the sacred, like the transcendent, is concerned with occupying what religious belief formerly occupied. The communist revolutionary is not concerned with furthering morality as religious morality understood it, rather, as Sartre said, “true morality is a permanent conversion into revolutionary action.” Such a conversion into revolutionary action is occupying the same axis that religious conversion and religious truth formerly occupied. Sloterdijk analyzes the October Revolution in Russia as an event that turned revolution into a spiritual event. While conversion typically means spiritually re-setting one’s life, revolution means redesigning the world from zero; and the Bolsheviks combined these two forms in a spiritual revolutionary conversion. But, according to Sloterdijk, revolutionary conversion is no longer efficacious after May ’68 because revolutionary movements have continually failed to transform everyday life. Thus, to “become a Marxist” or to gain a commitment to revolutionary action no longer not implies the same consequences precisely because revolutionary change has become an individualized ascetic routine unable to produce a fundamental revolutionary event or overthrow of existing conditions. Sloterdijk’s idea of communism as an ascetic life practice akin to religious conversion is compatible with Bloch’s idea of the warm-stream as the collective yearning towards emancipation implicit in historical religious movements.

Materialism and the Warm-Stream

Warm-stream Marxism is concerned with collective movements of emancipation and with understanding the upsurge of human freedom not as a completed state, but with a linking of this desire to a consideration of matter in a perpetually transformed state. The function of matter and materialism within warm-stream Marxist thought is in many ways the launching point of Bloch’s speculative philosophical thought. Cat Moir, in her superb book on Bloch’s materialism Ernst Bloch’s Speculative Materialism, shows how Bloch in his trilogy “Das Materialismusproblem” develops a concept of matter as the self-realizing impersonal agent of nature. According to Moir, this untranslated work is a bridge to understanding Bloch’s more widely read work on utopia and the Principle of Hope. Moir shows how for Bloch the very possibility of utopia resides in matter itself, and how human beings as “matter-become-conscious” beings are capable of realizing it.

Bloch’s wider work on materialism was never translated into English due to Stalinist censorship, and because of the assumption amongst many party functionaries that Bloch’s materialism was idealist. Moir shows how Bloch’s materialism was far more complicated than this accusation, and that while he argued that rethinking materialism must be begun again and again, he insisted that any consideration of materialism must involve “inviting all kinds of earlier voices,” including idealist thinkers from Plato and Avicenna to Kant and Hegel. Bloch perceived Hegel’s synthesis of substance and subject as resulting in an idealist fantasy world of pure anamnesis, and he thus refuted such a synthesis by isolating substance (matter) as a fundamentally incomplete process. In his later work Bloch accuses Hegel’s system of excluding real possibility, of thinking possibility as tied up with past historical cycles such that what we come to know must already have existed prior to our knowledge of it. It was this sense that Hegel’s dialectic and wider philosophical system foreclosed real possibility that led Bloch to consider Schelling’s ontology more closely, and to also engage in a genealogy on matter and materialism that stretched back to pre-Aristotelian Greek philosophers. Bloch’s materialism was open to idealist strains of thought—Schelling, Aristotle, Ibn Sina and Hegel—and he read metaphysical and mystical traditions as supportive of egalitarian conceptions of the cosmos and humanity. As the prominent translator and commentator on Bloch Peter Thompson argues, this interest in religious metaphysics was Bloch’s attempt to “search for the materialist base within the metaphysical apprehension of the religious worldview.”⁵

In the recently translated work Avicenna and the Aristotelian Left (2019), originally written as an appendix to his work on materialism, Doctrines of matter, preparations of its finality and openness, Bloch finds in Avicenna (the common European name given to the Islamic philosopher Ibn Sina) a crucial origin point to leftwing and emancipatory thought. In what follows, I aim to describe Bloch’s interest in Ibn Sina by shedding greater light on who Ibn Sina was for Islamic thought and for philosophy writ large, as well as to identify some of the important themes his thought offers to the tradition of warm-stream Marxism.

Ibn Sina’s Metaphysis and Wider Importance

Ibn Sina’s metaphysics and influence on Islamic and Occidental thought is nothing less than extraordinarily significant. Philosophically, Ibn Sina fuses Aristotle with Neoplatonism, arguing that existence is an accident and, as such, there is no existence implied in any essence. If a thing does not exist, it does not have an essence to cause it. By extension, before a thing exists it does not have a nature (or pre-determined essence) to determine it. Ibn Sina argues that existence is accidental to essence and therefore no contingent being is rid of contingency. The only self-sufficient being is God and from God’s self-sufficiency stems the contingency of the world, for nothing else could be necessary. Lenn E. Goodman, a well-known commentator on Ibn Sina shows how his idea of the cosmos was based on a theory of predestination even though he adopts a view that all matter is contingent. That is, there is still a necessary being (God) which determines the universe, although existence is radically contingent. Goodman argues the emphasis Ibn Sina placed on necessity amidst radical contingency resulted in a profound set of misunderstandings with other Islamic theological and philosophical critics. For example, the Ash’arite school argued that all causal determinations are vertical and external: every leaf that falls from the tree is determined by God. But in Ibn Sina’s view, God allows created beings to determine events for themselves.⁶

Ibn Sina also put forward a Platonic concept of God as one who is perfect and therefore beyond sensory experience, and combined this argument with an ontological argument based on a necessary absolute ontic⁷ existence of God. Since matter cannot exist without form, Ibn Sina argues that the matter of the world is eternal. But although matter is eternal, existence is an accident, which means that essence is not implied in anything necessarily. Because existence is prior to essence—both logically and ontologically—God bestows existence on things, that is, God gives form to matter but matter is mediated by the Aristotelian idea of the “Active Intellect.” Ibn Sina has a nontemporal view of creation based on the absolute act of creation—just like existence is contingent, so too is creation. Through man’s rational faculties and capacity for reflection and speculation humans can enter into a rational recognition of necessity. As Goodman writes:

The life that animates the heavens and becomes the paradigm and ultimate engine or energizer of the processes of nature is the product of the rational recognition of necessity.⁸

Ibn Sina’s metaphysics are thus radical in their emphasis on the incomplete and permanent contingency of matter and existence, as well as in the way he theorizes the Active Intellect as a source of the emanation of a communal collective truth that links man’s rational contemplation to God. Ibn Sina’s metaphysics are based on the metaphysical proposition of a synthesis of eternity with contingency, and as we will see when we turn to Bloch, much of this is in line with Bloch’s metaphysics. Although Bloch conflates Ibn Sina with Ibn Rushd (Averroes), a later and important Muslim philosopher, it is important to note that Ibn Rushd objected to Ibn Sina’s more radical idea of contingency. Ibn Rushd argued that contingency of all beings must be understood by the reference to an idea of causality if it is to reach the implication of an external cause for the object we see before us, because otherwise we have an infinite regress of causes.

Outside of Ibn Sina’s metaphysics, it is worth noting that Ibn Sina’s influence is widespread although a matter of some controversy amongst scholars. For example, in the recent masterwork by Islamic scholar and the late academic Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic, Ibn Sina is presented as “the man who effectively defined God for Muslims.”⁹ Ahmed identifies Ibn Sina as the thinker who emerges in the far east of the Islamic empire (modern-day Uzbekistan) in the 10th century (350 years after the Prophet Muhammad died) and grows to become the seminal theologian-philosopher that defined the “Balkans to Bengal complex” of Islamic societies. The Balkans to Bengal complex was a distinctive social and cultural expression of Islamic civilization that spanned a geographical territory and imprinted an entirely novel form of Islamic community, with Ibn Sina’s contribution to this complex being fundamental.

For Ibn Sina, the soul does not live on after death, but is purely a vegetative state; a natural organ. As a result, the eternal torture of the soul, held to be a doctrine in much of Islamic theology, is off the table as is eternal damnation. This idea led to a new concept of the self as formulated through self-knowledge. Ibn Sina’s work grew so much esteem that the elite educated classes adopted the study of philosophy within the madrassah educational system largely due to his influence. Ibn Sina’s influence also opened an entirely new way of thinking about the role of wisdom hikmah in relation to the divine. Hikmah became a source for navigating universal truths in societies of Muslims. Philosophical wisdom was both the enactment of practical rules and theoretical rules consonant with those values. Ahmed writes:

Ibn Sīnā conceptualized God as the sole Necessary Existent (wājib al-wujūd) upon which all other existents are necessarily contingent. It is this philosophers’ conceptualization of God that became the operative concept of the Divinity taught in madrasahs to students of theology via the standard introductory textbook on logic, physics, and metaphysics which was taught to students in madrasahs in cities and towns throughout the vast region from the Balkans to Bengal in the rough period 1350–1850, and which was tellingly entitled Hidāyat al-ḥikmah, or Guide to Ḥikmah.¹⁰

The Aristotelian Left

Unlike Aristotle, who sees matter as passive and inert, Ibn Sina views matter as possibility in the sense of a complete disposition to receive forms. He argues that philosophical truth contains the truth just as does the Qur’an, but it is hidden behind a veil.¹¹ Allah (God) is the inflowing of nature itself for Ibn Sina, and based on his idea of contingent matter he sees the whole of nature with an accent of monist tension. For Bloch, Ibn Sina discovers something seminal in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and gives birth to the “Aristotelian left”, because he posits that matter is a natural and dynamic (dyname) thing. This “left” is unlike the Aristotelian “right”, which is most notably represented by St. Thomas Aquinas who refused to think of matter as capable of changing itself. From the premise of matter as a fundamentally contingent and dynamic process, Ibn Sina would develop a theory of the Active Intellect beyond an idea of mere individual moral reflection, but as part of a process of universal reason connected to the community.

Bloch notes that Ibn Sina understands the “unity of the human intellect and the unity of active reason” and this understanding posed a profound challenge to both Christianity and to Islamic orthodoxies because it portended the application of this principle beyond the bounds of the religious community. Ibn Sina thus opens the way for a radical form of tolerance across communities by his idea of the Active Intellect. Bloch further observes that the influence this universal reason had on influencing a “new pathos of tolerance” is connected to his idea of the warm-stream horizon of hope we identified earlier. It is also connected to Thomas Müntzer, who declared human freedom on the basis of the new universal reason.

The most technical contribution Ibn Sina made to philosophy was thus what he said about the wider matter-form debate within Aristotlian scholarship. It is clear that Aristotle’s idea of matter was one that taught matter was in the first place something completely indeterminate and unformed, itself uncreated, but out of which all things can be created. What Ibn Sina gives to Aristotle’s idea of matter is the “notion of ferment, self-creation and the sheer incompleteness of this possibility.”¹² This insight loosens the bonds between being and matter and enables the philosopher to think of the explication of the world out of itself. This immanent view of matter and the possibility of worldly redemption is far afield from the right-wing Aristotelians under St. Thomas who posited “a fully transcendent theism of pure spirit.”¹³ Aquinas removes that which realizes forms itself (entelechy) and relegates this act to an exclusive gift of the divine Act-Being, the Being of realization, and subordinates it to the totally transcendental. Influenced by Neoplatonism, Ibn Sina secured the contingent existence of things from a necessary divine being, and as such his vision of the cosmos is one in which God allows the universe to remain radically contingent. Aquinas, on the other hand, says that the essence of God can be nothing other than his being, guided under the maxim, “I will be what I will be.” This conservative metaphysics makes becoming devoid of any future dimensions. Ibn Sina thus made way for philosophers such as Spinoza who would argue that the essence of religion is not dogma, but praxis in the world.

Since matter conditions everything in Ibn Sina’s metaphysics, matter is both potential and potent. Matter has to move, due to its innate propensity towards the realization of that which is not-yet become. This idea of matter is hugely influential on warm-stream Marxist thought in two ways: firstly, it enables an aesthetic idea of realism and artmaking quite distinct from socialist realism of Bloch’s time. As Karam AbuSehly has shown, Bloch’s reading of Ibn Sina influences his own ideas of aesthetic realism, where attention is paid to the object in itself, unlike in idealist aesthetics.¹⁴ In addition to influencing Bloch’s theories of aesthetics and realism, Ibn Sina’s concept of matter also influenced his ideas on utopia. If utopia is fundamentally covered in darkness in the sense that it cannot be pictured; it cannot be named. It is the thing that is missing, and accordingly utopia puts matter in motion for its realization and the realization of itself. The philosophical and materialist genealogy Bloch provides us is an indispensable resource for understanding the warm-stream of Marxist emancipation, and it helps us broaden our relations to religious discourse both historically and in the world today.

2020.07.26

Spontaneous Philosophy in Science and Activism

The Cosmonaut crew sits down to discuss Althusser’s Lectures on Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists. We historically situate the text and talk about Althusser’s conception of science and of philosophy, how they both relate to each other and what happens when one exploits the other and “common sense”, in the form of the dominant ideology, creeps in. This is followed by a discussion on actual examples of how philosophy and science interrelate, and what it means to defend a materialist line in philosophy. We discuss philosophical practice in politics and end by providing an extension of Althusser’s concept to include Spontaneous Philosophy of the Activist, or how “common sense” creeps in to activism, and we end up reproducing liberal concepts in our organizing.

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2020.06.272020.06.27

Marx Beyond the Mystics

Continuing our theme of exploring the relationship between religion and socialism, Peter Claassen argues that the influence of Christian Mysticism on Hegel impacted the thought of Karl Marx.

“The mystification which dialectic suffers in Hegel’s hands, by no means prevents him from being the first to present its general form of working in a comprehensive and conscious manner. With him it is standing on its head. It must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.” Karl Marx – Capital Volume 1

One of the most misunderstood parts of Marxism is its relationship and debt to Christianity. Much has been said about Marx and Hegel’s relationship, what it means for the dialectic to be mystifying, his relationship to Hegel’s understanding of history, and so forth. However, worse than this is the sheer lack of discussion around Marx, utopian socialism, and Christianity. While some have commented upon Marxism as a form of millenarian Christianity, including members of the far-right like Mircea Eliade, there has been little discussion within the far-left, save for a few like Ernst Bloch and Roland Boer. In this essay, we will go through the ways in which Marx through Hegel and others owes a significant debt to various forms of Christian mysticism, and the ways in which his work parallels those works. Specifically, we will look at his early works like the Paris Manuscripts and the critique of Hegel’s Political Philosophy, where we find these ideas very clearly expressed, as well as in Engels’ later work on Utopian Socialism. This will be coupled with an explanation of why Marx thinks that Hegel is a mystic, and what that means for his demystification of the dialectic. What we will discover is that Marx has a deep and ongoing debt to mystical currents in Christianity, as mediated both by Hegel and by the utopian socialists, and that this seems to be understood in part by figures such as Lenin.

We must start by asking what it means for something to be the rational kernel of something else, i.e., what does it mean for the dialectic to be the rational kernel of Hegelian mysticism? To understand this, we must come to understand what Hegel’s mysticism is, and his relationship to mysticism in general. Glenn Alexander Magee has written a brilliant exposition of what Hegel’s mysticism is, in relation to the Hermetic Tradition. To condense 200+ pages into a short space, Hegel believed in extra-sensory perception, conversed with friends over the nature of magic,¹ publicly aligned himself with German mystic reactionary Franz von Baader,² was accused by Schelling of stealing his entire philosophy from Jakob Boehme,³ a Lutheran peasant mystic,⁴ and, most outlandishly, believed in a kind of Earth Spirit.⁵ This, however, is less interesting than Magee’s exposition of Hegel’s relationship to these prior mystics, namely that Hegel’s speculative philosophy, that is to say his dialectical method, is most comparable to mythopoetic thinking, stripped of its sensuous quality,⁶ as Hegel himself argues is the failing of Boehme.⁷ Most tellingly of all however is Hegel’s belief that magic is a lower form of philosophy.⁸ What all this leads us to conclude is that Hegel understands his philosophy to be higher elevation, or more accurately articulation, of what the mystics had already grasped. If we use the language of Marx, Hegel understands that he is recovering the speculative kernel of sensuous mysticism. However, it is important here to note that Hegel’s dialectic is understood as holding up a mirror to the Absolute, God, by which he/it can comprehend itself as Hegel says “it is the exposition, and in fact the self-exposition, of the absolute and only a display of what it is.”⁹ Further, the actual motor off which Hegel’s dialectic runs is not “the grasping of opposites” or even “immanent critique” but what can only be described as the logic of supersession, with the two prior ideas being mere subsections of this. The logic of supersession is, namely, that two seeming opposites can be grasped together internal to their own movement and reveal themselves to subsist in a third, for example, Being and Nothing are in fact moments of Becoming, as coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be.¹⁰ This concept is thoroughly mystical; while Magee points out we do find it in Judaism,¹¹ the most obvious example of this is the Christian notion of how Christianity supersedes prior religions, namely Judaism and paganism. As Christ says, “Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill.”¹² This logic itself is found in God, where God gives rise to his other, the world, but through Christ reconciles himself to the world giving rise to the Holy Spirit, which is the inner bond of love between Christ, God and the Spirit itself. As such the very core of Hegel’s system, the logic of supersession, the thing off which the whole machine runs, is thoroughly mystical in origin.

Naturally, we must now ask what is Marx doing to Hegel, if Hegel himself is demystifying the mystics? In short, Marx understands himself as taking Hegel’s system further than Hegel himself could. The most obvious rejection would be the belief in extrasensory perception, world spirits and similar “entities”; however, even here we find a pronounced Hegelianism. Specifically, the only way “the rational kernel” can be interpreted is the concept of speculative philosophy as such. Therefore, what Marx supersedes is the sensuous mystical elements of Hegel’s philosophy, in favor of the rational kernel, namely speculation as applied to matter.

“My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life process of the human brain, i.e., the process of thinking, which, under the name of “the Idea,” he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of “the Idea.” With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”¹³

Here precisely Marx betrays his consummate Hegelianism, for as Magee points out the very term speculative philosophy, qua Hegel, is about the reflection of God back into himself, through the activity of the philosopher, hence why Hegel considers himself to be writing an autobiography of the Absolute, the Unconditioned. As Cyril Smith has correctly noted, the purpose here of Marx is not to form another theory, but to strike down all theories, and do nothing other than translate the material world into the forms of personal thought.¹⁴

It should however be noted that within Hegel scholarship there exists a significant debate over whether Hegel can be counted as “metaphysical”.¹⁵ This seemingly arcane debate however has serious importance for the interpretation of Marx. The key relevance here is that the opposition in Hegelianism between metaphysical and non-metaphysical Hegels is the question of if Hegel is arguing for a new super-being. Non-metaphysical Hegelians attack their opposition as positing that Hegel is arguing for wondrous new entities with bizarre properties, a demiurge. By comparison, the metaphysical Hegelians argue that what he is discussing in concepts like the Idea, or the Absolute, is reality in itself. As such his Absolute is not God as understood in popular culture, a kind of impish Superman.¹⁶ Rather the Absolute is the Unconditioned. This of course is where the description of pantheism comes from, as if God is the Unconditioned then all reality must in some sense be a manifestation of he/she/it.

The importance of this discussion, however, comes when we realize that Engels specifically distinguishes Aristotle and ancient Greek philosophy from “metaphysics”, saying that Aristotle, “the most encyclopaedic of [the Greek philosophers]), had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought”, and that further Hegel is not a metaphysician.¹⁷ As Hegel clearly says, “In both (Philosophy and Religion) the object is Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth.”¹⁸ However this God can no longer be understood as a God simply beyond us, a demiurge beyond, but rather as the unconditioned truth of reality.¹⁹ Marx strangely seems to have almost stumbled into Hegel’s position by attacking a crude metaphysical reading of Hegel, wherein the Idea is simply a demiurge, a superman. As such in opposing the Idea as demiurge he has bizarrely actually hit upon Hegel’s true position. Whether this is a mere rhetorical flourish is unclear.

As such, I agree then with Smith that Marx is not interested in then proposing simply another ideology, rather he is proposing the dissolution of all ideology, all theory as such, and rather simply attempting to tie himself to reality as such. His “dialectical materialism” would then be more dialectical than materialist, for the very reason that the interest is in the method, which as Engels clearly indicates Aristotle more readily grasps than the metaphysicians and materialists, ala Locke. ²⁰ It is the method that Lenin clearly is drawn to, in his Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism, and he again clearly understands this point of dialectics as a form of speculation, that is to say reflection of the objective social fact, sans distortion or interpretation. ²¹ However, if Marx is then maintaining the rational kernel, it must be noted that this rational kernel is still speculative philosophy, a doctrine that ultimately emerges from European mysticism. The important part here to note then is that this doctrine of the mystics, if taken up within the dialectical process, and taking Hegel further than he could take himself, would necessarily render Marx more mystical and more Hegelian than Hegel himself, in the same fashion that Hegel’s de-sensualizing of the mystics made him more mystical than the mystics. Precisely, in superseding Hegel with respect to Hegel’s mysticism, extra-sensory perception, and so forth, Marx preserves the essential core of Hegel’s mysticism, speculative philosophy, and thus is more Hegelian than Hegel, more mystical than the mystics.

The issue for any would-be interpreter of Marx is where this leaves him in relation to God. He clearly understands the Idea/Absolute and so forth as a kind of demiurge, which they are not, and he is proclaiming his loyalty to a philosophical system which requires God, because it is nothing other than God’s self-exposition. If this system is to make sense we are forced basically to fall back to Marx’s Spinozism,²² and accept that what dialectics is reflecting back into itself is the material world as such, so in essence Marx can only be distinct from Hegel in so far as his Absolute is Spinoza’s substance, or matter as one might put it. This itself is ironically betrayed in the name “dialectical materialism”, which one might better call “speculative materialism” in contrast to Hegel’s “speculative idealism” (though this is separate from Quentin Meillassoux’s use of the same term). What dialectical materialism as a term reveals, specifically, is that this is dialectics as applied to matter, that is to say speculative philosophy applied to the material world as such, or as Marx says “the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought”.

Having come to understand that Marx sees himself as doing to Hegel what Hegel did to prior mystics, there then comes the question of the relationship between scientific socialism and utopian socialism. Immediately we must grasp that the type of science here cannot mean a kind of natural science, as Engels says in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific:

“The analysis of Nature into its individual parts, the grouping of the different natural processes and objects in definite classes, the study of the internal anatomy of organized bodies in their manifold forms — these were the fundamental conditions of the gigantic strides in our knowledge of Nature that have been made during the last 400 years. But this method of work has also left us as legacy the habit of observing natural objects and processes in isolation, apart from their connection with the vast whole; of observing them in repose, not in motion; as constraints, not as essentially variables; in their death, not in their life. And when this way of looking at things was transferred by Bacon and Locke from natural science to philosophy, it begot the narrow, metaphysical mode of thought peculiar to the last century.”²³

Thus the “real basis” from which we make “a science of Socialism”²⁴ cannot simply be the kind of positivist social science of the modern-day, as a system of division and breaking down. Rather, as Engels makes clear the basis is dialectics; however, having gone through Hegel, Magee, and Engels it should at this point be explicit that dialectics is the “operating system” of European mysticism, which emerges from ancient Greek philosophy. One might almost imagine it better to translate Wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus as ‘Hermetic Socialism’ to convey the necessity of this point. The scientific method of scientific socialism is dialectics, and dialectics is nothing other than the method of the mystics.

Having been brought now to this point, we must then ask: if the dialectical method taken from Hegel is mysticism stripped of its extraneous elements, what then is the distinction between scientific socialism and utopian socialism? Engels again provides the answer:

“Although Hegel was — with Saint-Simon — the most encyclopaedic mind of his time, yet he was limited, first, by the necessary limited extent of his own knowledge and, second, by the limited extent and depth of the knowledge and conceptions of his age.”²⁵

“And although, upon the whole, the bourgeoisie, in their struggle with the nobility, could claim to represent at the same time the interests of the different working-classes of that period, yet in every great bourgeois movement there were independent outbursts of that class which was the forerunner, more or less developed, of the modern proletariat. For example, at the time of the German Reformation and the Peasants’ War, the Anabaptists and Thomas Müntzer; in the great English Revolution, the Levellers; in the great French Revolution, Babeuf.”²⁶

“One thing is common to all three. Not one of them appears as a representative of the interests of that proletariat which historical development had, in the meantime, produced. Like the French philosophers, they do not claim to emancipate a particular class to begin with, but all humanity at once.”²⁷

In short, the failure of the utopian socialists is the failure to center themselves upon the proletariat. This is of course the same failure that Marx places at the feet of Hegel. Hegel in his alienation cannot see the possibility of communism, and thus imagines the highest order as being the Prussian state.²⁸ For their part the utopian socialists fail not because of their vision, but because they do not see the means of delivering the emancipation of all of humanity, namely that this is only possible through the proletariat, and so want all of society to rise. It is important here now to note that these utopians were also explicitly mystics, and that the visions they presented of communist society were explicitly mystical. However, this is not what Engels criticizes them for, and thinks that this mysticism is a mere epiphenomenon of the failure to center themselves upon the proletariat. Further, Engels recognizes in Fourier a “masterly” use of the dialectical method.²⁹

Further, the mysticism of the utopians was extreme. Owen, Fourier, and Saint-Simon were all deeply mystical. All of them believed in one form of extra-sensory perception or another,³⁰ and Saint-Simon openly called for a new hierarchical and mystical Christianity, as Engels notes.³¹ Fourier famously believed that the seas would turn into lemonade, but more interestingly he has a vision of the reconciliation of man and beast, or with the emergence of species like Anti-Lions, pacifistic animals that would emerge with the development of human civilization. This vision however is not abandoned by Marx, rather as he discusses in the Paris Manuscripts, communism as such is the reconciliation of men with nature, where nature is understood to be the inorganic body of man.³² This is the core of what Fourier is proposing, the exterior mystical form of Fourier’s position, namely that animals and humans, now in conflict, would with the coming of communism be reconciled, is still contained within the notion that nature is the inorganic body of man, which in class society we are alienated from.

Apocalypse 42. A new heaven and new earth. Revelation 21 v 29. Borcht. Phillip Medhurst Collection

However, it is necessary to elaborate on the specific connections between communism and the kind of mystical Christianity from which utopian socialism openly emerges. First, we have the mystical understanding of the New Earth and soteriology. Marx and Fourier’s visions of communism clearly parallel the vision of the New Earth, that is the earth after the second coming, as seen in Eastern Orthodox Christianity, wherein man shall serve as the cosmic priesthood for a totally recreated world, in which a new covenant between man and beast is created and all shall be with God.³³ Fourier’s vision wherein society is reorganized into a series of pseudo-monasteries³⁴ further parallels the famous vision of Joachim de Fiore, who envisaged the world to come as a contemplative one, in which all would be monks.³⁵ This vision parallels the vision of communism as presented in the Paris Manuscripts, wherein nature is man’s inorganic body, and the coming of communism is the overcoming of alienation, man from man and man from nature:

“Physically man lives only on these products of nature, whether they appear in the form of food, heating, clothes, a dwelling, etc. The universality of man appears in practice precisely in the universality which makes all nature his inorganic body – both inasmuch as nature is (1) his direct means of life, and (2) the material, the object, and the instrument of his life activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body – nature, that is, insofar as it is not itself human body. Man lives on nature – means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous interchange if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature.”³⁶

Further Marx writes that:

“Communism as the positive transcendence of private property as human self-estrangement, and therefore as the real appropriation of the human essence by and for man; communism therefore as the complete return of man to himself as a social (i.e., human) being – a return accomplished consciously and embracing the entire wealth of previous development. This communism, as fully developed naturalism, equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism; it is the genuine resolution of the conflict between man and nature and between man and man – the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence, between objectification and self-confirmation, between freedom and necessity, between the individual and the species. Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.”³⁷

This again betrays the relationship between communism and Christian eschatology, where, as we find in Eastern Orthodoxy, the coming of the New Earth is in a certain sense a return, in the same way that higher stage communism is a return to primitive communism, and so too is the New Jerusalem a return to the Garden of Eden. The difference between Man in the Garden and Man in the New Jerusalem is that the new Man will have knowledge of good and evil. The process of alienation was necessary precisely because it is through alienation Man has come to know himself.³⁸ As such the return to communism as at the same time an advance. The analogy that we find is that for Marx, alienation is functionally identical to sin, or to use the Greek hamartia, to miss the mark. However, sin should not be understood as simply a violation of God’s law; rather, sin properly understood is separation from God, which ultimately is separation from one’s own nature³⁹ as made in the image of God, and from our fellow man, through transgression of his person. This again is identical to Marx’s understanding of alienation, wherein alienated existence is not simply alienation from yourself, but alienation from your fellow man, and alienation from the world.⁴⁰ Further, the insistence upon man’s nature as socially creative labor, must be understood as an attack upon Hegel’s Lutheranism. Here Marx disagrees with the doctrine of Sola Fide, i.e. that we can come to reconcile ourselves with God through belief alone, but rather it is necessary that we must act to reconcile ourselves to God. This is almost identical to the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of theosis, that reconciliation with God must be a process of activity and purgation.⁴¹

What however is more telling is Marx’s remark that Communism is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence”. For most western Theists God is an ontologically simple being, in that He has no distinction between his existence and his essence, following from Aristotle and Aquinas.⁴² The only being in whom the strife between existence and essence is resolved is God. Marx’s position then that communism is the resolution of the distinction between existence and essence is tantamount to the belief that communism is the state of sainthood, wherein the saint has subsumed themselves into God, ceasing to exist as a self-sufficient entity in their unity with God.⁴³ It should then be clear that the only way to interpret Marx’s understanding of communism is as a demystified or stripped away account of salvation and eschatology within Christianity, as mediated by utopian socialism. Now one could argue that this is to be found in other religious traditions, which it is. However, it is unclear that Marx or Engels had much contact with those traditions, while they had extensive contact with Christianity.

The linkage however does not cease there. The basic Augustinian thesis, that the Church is the City of God on Earth, already present in this world,⁴⁴ prior to the end of the world, is preserved in Marx. The specific attack that Marx has upon the utopians should be understood first and foremost as an Augustinian attack upon them. As Camatte correctly points out the essential characteristic of the proletariat is that it is revolutionary; what it means to be revolutionary however is participation in the Gemeinwesen, the material human community, that is organized through the Party.⁴⁵ As Marx says, “The head of this emancipation is philosophy, its heart the proletariat”.⁴⁶ So too must we understand that the issue of the utopians was their imagining of communism as a beyond, to which all society must be raised,⁴⁷ rather than the true position, namely that communism is nothing other than unalienated life as such. Communism precisely cannot be defeated because communism as such is nothing other than the inner truth of all class society. However, it is only under capitalism that communism can be achieved because it is under capitalism that class struggle, that is the struggle against alienation and oppression, is at its purest. Augustine’s attack upon the pagans was against their belief that the sack of Rome showed the failure of the Church; rather he correctly pointed out that the Church quite simply cannot be destroyed.⁴⁸ The Church as such is imperishable, and cannot be overcome or corrupted or destroyed. Thus we observe that in Marx’s attack upon the Utopians, namely in their imagining of Communism as a beyond, he charges them with failing to see the tool by which communism will be achieved, or in other words, that the path to the City of God is through the Church.⁴⁹ It is only through the triumph of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which is in its core truth already communism, and as Camatte correctly reads, is also the party, that we can be delivered to communism.

Finally, it is necessary to consider the nature, purpose, and role of the militant. The rejection of the cult of personality by Marx must be understood as nothing other than the assertion of the ultimately clerical nature of the militant. This is found consistently within the works of the great revolutionary leaders. As Trotsky says, “the Bolsheviks appear in relation to the democrats and social-democrats of all hues as did the Jesuits in relation to the peaceful ecclesiastical hierarchy”,⁵⁰ and as Marx says, “such was my aversion to the personality cult … I never allowed one of these [honors] to enter the domain of publicity”.⁵¹ The basic assertion here is nothing other than that of Saint Gregory the Great in naming himself Servus Servorum Dei, slave of the slaves of God,⁵² or when Christ asserts, “And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant”.⁵³ The essential point here is that the militant does not seek to speak for themselves. As Camatte points out, scientific socialism is not the work of an individual, but rather it is the work of the species.⁵⁴ So too are the priests properly conceived, no longer living for themselves but for the group. This is the essential characteristic of the militant, as well as the theoretician, who at the end of the day must also himself be a militant. The militant does not seek to act for themselves but for humanity as such, and it is in this way that he becomes reconciled with his nature, and ultimately with reality. By understanding that the nature that is within himself is the species-being of man, as socially creative labor, he comes to understand that to overcome alienation is submission to the species as such. However, as has been pointed out before, the goal by which the liberation of the species, that is, the ending of alienation, is achieved is through the proletariat. The proletariat in its revolutionary nature harnesses the species-being of man, and the role of the militant is to sacrifice himself for this purpose. As such the task of the militant is nothing other than the organization of the proletariat; they are in this sense nothing but a conduit through which the proletariat, and thus humanity as such, acts. In the same fashion, the priest is nothing other than the conduit by which the Holy Spirit acts. The militant is against the cult of personality precisely because the cult fails to understand the proper function of the militant, that the militant does not live for themselves but for the species and the proletariat; they have no honor in themselves apart from their function.

This brings us finally to what Marx sees as the issue with religion. The famous quotation of the opium of the masses does us well here. The very fault with religion is the same as was identified with social democracy, that in being an easing of pain it distracts from the ultimate necessity of class struggle, from the struggle to overcome alienation. It as a vehicle is unable to achieve its ultimate end, i.e. communism, that is the end of alienation, both of man from man and man from nature. This, however, is not atheism, for as Marx himself notes, socialism is at once the overcoming of religion and atheism.⁵⁵ In the same way, Christianity understands itself as being the overcoming of both Judaism and paganism. Where the pagans insisted on the plurality of Gods, the Jews insisted upon the singularity of existence, and thus the singularity of God; Christianity understood itself as overcoming both of these and recognizing the diversity in unity that is the triune God. The same is true of socialism. Socialism stands in relation to atheism as atheism to religion and has overcome both, precisely because it recognizes that the relation is no longer man to God, as with religion, nor man to himself, as with atheism, but with man to his nature and to nature itself. Thus, even in Marx’s anti-religious moments, he reveals the ways in which he is deeply influenced by utopian socialism and its origins in Christianity. However, what further complicates the idea that Marx should simply be read as an atheist is his declaration that communism is “the true resolution of the strife between existence and essence”. As has been discussed prior this seriously threatens the idea that Marx is an atheist in the same fashion that even Feuerbach is an atheist, rather, in a Hegelian fashion, he seeks to overcome the failures of both atheism and religion. In the same way that a Christian is more Platonic than the Platonists, and more Jewish than the Jews, since Christianity has overcome both, scientific socialism is then more religious than the religious, and more atheist than the atheists.

A Russian icon from the Novgorod school The Raising of Lazarus, 15th century. 72 x 60 cm. The Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.

To conclude, I would draw attention to the examples of the Biblical prophets, and their attitude towards God. As Isaiah says “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I. Send me!”.⁵⁶ Here we see the basic characteristic of Marx, namely the desire not to speak for one’s self, but rather to simply become the mouthpiece by which the species, or God, speaks. Smeared with coal, Marx and Isaiah’s lips are united precisely in their collective proclamation of man’s unity with man and nature. Having gone through these sources it should be clear that what Marx is aiming to do is to correctly formulate the doctrines that religion at its most religious holds to, namely when it is aiming to overcome the alienation of man from man and man from nature. However, this must be understood within the context of Marx’s debt to Hegel and utopian socialism, for separate from this connection the very structure of Marx’s overcoming fails to make sense and loses all coherence.